The Delighted Spirit: Shakespeare at UQ 2016

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Caesar’s assassins anticipate that their killing of the tyrant will be performed in theatres far into the future – and even in languages and lands unknown to the conspirators themselves: “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” Shakespeare’s own dramatic works have displayed this extraordinary quality of adaptability and transportability: they are themselves “acted over” in numerous places far away from Shakespeare’s native land, and in countless languages “unknown” to Shakespeare himself.

The University of Queensland has a long and distinguished history of supporting the study of Shakespeare and his age. Shakespeare has been taught at the University since classes began in 1911, when Hermiene Ulrich, UQ’s first lecturer in literature (and the first woman teacher of literature at an Australian university) assigned Henry V,Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest for students in her course on Modern Language and Literature. Ulrich’s successor, J. J. Stable, was, as well as being a promoter of Australian literature, a scholar of Shakespeare: in 1936 he edited Julius Caesar for the Australian Students’ Shakespeare series, published by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 the University will mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by hosting a series of lectures, symposia, concerts, film screenings, workshops, performances, a rare-book exhibition, and other events exploring the ways in which Shakespeare continues to delight, provoke, and fascinate those who engage with his works. The series is entitled The Delighted Spirit, a phrase taken from Claudio’s speech in Act Three, Scene One, of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in which Claudio gives an impassioned plea for “worldly life”—life which, he insists, is always, and no matter how full of hardships, to be preferred “To what we fear of death”. This series of commemorative events, then, will explore the life in Shakespeare’s works—how they continue to live on and inspire, stimulate, and give pleasure in “states unborn and accents yet unknown”.

Bringing together expertise in the fields of the history of political thought, the history of medicine, gender studies, and literary criticism, this cross-disciplinary symposium will reconsider conceptions of the “body politic” in Shakespeare and other early modern authors.